Ethan Miller/Getty Images Wynn Resorts CEO Steve Wynn was accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of employees in a story by the Wall Street Journal on Friday. Shares of the company plummeted after the report. Wynn is…

The U.S. economy expanded at a slower-than-projected pace in the fourth quarter on drags from trade and inventory depletion, offsetting strength in consumer spending and business investment that signals solid momentum entering 2018.

Google is pushing hard to make artificial intelligence as easy to access as cloud computing, building services that reduce both costs and the technical skill required from users. To my mind, there is a strong parallel with how Amazon Web Services made it easier and cheaper for companies to build web apps.

Help businesses with limited ML expertise start building their own high-quality custom models by using advanced techniques like learning2learn and transfer learning

Google seems to be in the vanguard, but Amazon and Microsoft are pursuing similar agendas. For AI startups this means that machine learning expertise will become relatively less important whilst access to data and customer understanding will rise in significance. Given that ML expertise has been in short supply we can expect to see a sharp rise in the number of high-quality startups using machine learning to make better products (as distinct from low-quality startups that claim to use machine learning but don’t really). It also means that the opportunity space will tip towards applications and away from infrastructure.

At Forward Partners we’ve had “Applied AI” as one of our two focus areas for investments for around six months now. We define Applied AI as anything that mimics human cognition (that’s the AI bit) in an application applied to real-world problems using well-understood technologies. We insist on ‘well-understood technologies’ because as an early stage investor we want to be funding companies that can get products to market in predictable time-frames rather than what I sometimes unkindly refer to as research projects. From our perspective, services like Cloud AutoML are great because they add to the available suite of well-understood technologies and therefore increase the range of startups we can back. This is a trend we can expect to continue as Google, Amazon and Microsoft offer more services in this area as they compete to keep people inside their ecosystems.